Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Today in climate hysteria -- facts are inconvenient

Various liberal mouthpieces have begun popping up again, pushing the climate hysteria meme, probably as a way to distract from those pesky "phony scandals" the President's been complaining about.

There was one commentator going on about the rising temperatures -- hottest years in the last century, blah, blah, blah. Chris Hayes mocking California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher for his talk to an enthusiastic Tea Party group. And then former tv critic for the LA Times, Brian Lowry, now writing for Variety, saying there's no such thing as a credible dissenting voice on climate change. Really?!

Hayes did a nice job with the misdirection in his piece, turning Rohrabacher's talk on its ear, claiming that the Tea Party cry for limited government meant they had to disallow any possibility of Global Warming or any other climate crisis.

Problem is, anyone with access to a computer and the knowledge of how to dig for info can debunk anything uninformed commentators like Hayes and Lowry have to say. The graph below is from NOAA. It shows a 15 year period from 1998 to 2013 of continental US temperatures:

I created that with NOAA's interactive database. The horizontal line is a one hundred year baseline average of 52.3 degrees. The blue line is the trending of the last 15 years. Take a look. That ain't goin' up boys! And that is a FACT! And that kind of data is available to anyone who takes the time to find it.

Heard the Prez going on about warming and polar ice melting the other day? Look at these two graphs, also publicly available:

The top graph shows that the ice melt in the arctic is the lowest amount in 34 years. The second graph shows that the arctic "summer" has been one of the coldest and shortest on record. And again, this isn't some conservative "tea-bagger" spouting this stuff, it is simply what the data show.

When people like Hayes (whose degree is in philosophy, not climate science) start going on about rising temperatures, it's important to note that they are cherry-picking data to find places where indeed the temperature is up, but only by hundredths of a degree! Things they ominously claim are true -- not only more storms and wildfires but more intense ones, are simply not borne out by the facts. And those facts are available to the general public via the various agencies that measure these sorts of things.

Commentators like Hayes and the general public believe in climate hysteria because they want to. Not because there is any science or factual data to back them up. And it is their political pig-headedness that is dangerous, not those who simply want to have an honest conversation about the topic.